The Florida Project’s Sean Baker: ‘I wanted the kids to be the kings and queens of their domain’

The Florida Project is a glorious film, as everyone keeps telling its director Sean Baker. His movie – the firecracker story of a six-year-old girl, her friends and single mother in a scuffed motel outside Walt Disney World in Orlando – has been lavished with praise since this year’s Cannes festival. Audiences have cheered, critics raved. The hum about awards is loud. Acclaim has come from almost every corner. “We’ve had some really supportive comments from child psychologists,” Baker says. “And that’s wonderful because you want to feel you got that aspect of the story right.”

Almost every corner. At 46, Baker looks young enough to make you think there must have been a misprint, with the shag of hair of a bassist in an indie band. He pauses and frowns. Of course, some people haven’t liked the film, he says. One screening, he adds, brought criticism for him also having served as co-writer, producer and editor. His voice turns to a taunt: “‘Sean Baker, you wore too many hats! Many walked out.’” Was that a specific message? “A tweet.” Later, I search for it on Twitter. Among the endless love, it was sent from an account with 316 followers, nestled between complaints about the owner’s pick-up truck. Included too was a verdict Baker now repeats word-for-word: “‘#Worst Film of the Year.’”

He doesn’t sound angry. He sounds wounded. Baker is flawlessly, endlessly polite. He hunches on the sofa, apologises for his jet lag, for not being able to find the right words to express himself. Some details about his films might suggest a certain brashness. The pinky-green haired mother of The Florida Project is played by Bria Vinaite, a heavily tattooed first-time actor Baker found through Instagram, with a business selling weed-themed merchandise. His last film, Tangerine, a microbudget comedy about two transgender sex workers in Los Angeles, was entirely shot on iPhones. So much for expectations.

The Florida Project, like his other films, is so human it hurts. Even for those who didn’t grow up under the pastel skies of Florida, the movie will spark a rush of childhood memories, like audio-visual Pop Rocks. The child’s eye view was carefully constructed. “When the kids are in shot, the camera is at their eye level. There isn’t a single moment on screen where we’re looking down on them. I wanted them to be big – kings and queens of their domain.”

But, like all children, Baker’s kings and queens are subject to the adult world. For their ringleader Moonee, played by newcomer Brooklynn Prince, home is a garishly painted budget motel in sight of the turrets of the Magic Kingdom. Behind the candy-cute surface of the movie are hard truths – behind them, substantial research into the real low-cost motels that ring the Disney empire, lived in by poor families since the financial crash of 2008. “We spent a long time with child-protection agencies and motel managers,” he says. “It’s a fictional film, but what it’s based on happens all the time.”

This is a Baker signature. US cinema likes to deal in hot new things – Quentin Tarantino was one once, as was Wes Anderson, and so on. But now, alongside film-makers such as Jordan Peele (Get Out) and the Safdie brothers (Good Time), Baker feels like a different director for a different time. Long before The Florida Project, his films were vivid spins on the real world. 2004’s Takeout, co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, revolved around an illegal Chinese immigrant in New York. The same city was the setting for The Prince of Broadway, where a Ghanaian hawker of Gucci knockoffs abruptly coped with fatherhood. In Starlet, an out-of-work young actress and an elderly woman forged a friendship in LA’s San Fernando valley. He made movies among communities other movies didn’t know existed, about characters who were funny, resourceful and built from fact as much as fiction.

“I see the through-line now,” he says. “But I wasn’t always 100% aware of it, because I try to hold back from too much self-analysis. My fear is always …” He re-starts his sentence several times, trying to pin down his thoughts. “Already, it’s getting to the point where I fear I will become a caricature. It feels dangerous when people say, ‘Oh, Sean Baker focuses on marginalised people.’ And offensive. As if I’m standing there with my planner thinking, ‘OK, where’s the next marginalised group I can make a movie about?’”

Baker wryly predicts his film will end up remembered best as the first movie of the scarily gifted Brooklynn Prince. But the other wildcard is Vinaite, whom he saw online while looking for character inspiration rather than an actor. Now she is up on screen, another raw shot of charisma matching Willem Dafoe, cast as a sweet-hearted motel manager, moment for moment.

It isn’t the first time Baker has embarked on research and come back with a star – or two. Consulting with the trans community in LA before Tangerine, he stumbled into Mya Taylor and her friend Kitana Kiki Rodriguez. It soon became evident that no trained actor could do what they did better than them. Audiences were duly introduced to the pair as the leads of the movie, hustling magnetically up Santa Monica Boulevard.

If Tangerine was Baker’s breakthrough, it had been coming for decades. He grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, the son of a patent-lawyer father and a teacher mother. At six, she introduced him to Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. “From that moment it was the whole cliche: Super 8 films; camcorder films; AV club at high school; torturing my sister by making her be in my films.” It was only when he got to New York University to study film that he looked around and realised most of his classmates had come from the exact same milieu with the exact same backstory.

His first feature was Four Letter Words – a scabrous portrait of suburban white dudes. Even then, his perspective was his own. “It was pretty damning. It plays as comedy but the characters are horribly misogynist.”

Then life got in the way. Many of us find our 20s tough. For Baker, they were complicated by a heroin problem. I haven’t seen him discuss it before, but he mentions it without embarrassment. If you’re born white, male, middle-class and American, he says, “you’ve really been handed everything.” And still, addiction can take a piece of you. “I lost a lot of time. That’s why, when you look at my peers, they’re 10 years younger than me. I went through it hard. But I had support from people close to me, and from NA [Narcotics Anonymous]. And I was lucky enough to get out.”

Baker has been clean for almost 20 years. Now, with the success of The Florida Project at his back, choices are presenting themselves. “I’ve told my agent to push the idea of me as a director for hire off the table. Otherwise we’re wasting people’s time.” Instead, he wants his next film to be an unironic hearts-and-flowers romcom – set among junkies. “Can we only give middle-class people who have their lives together love and romance? So I want to make something that is absolutely hardcore but with all the tropes of – wait, give me a true 80s romcom – ” When Harry Met Sally? “Right! When Harry Met Sally!”

Related: Tangerine review – one-crazy-night transgender drama has real energy

He beams, until his smile tightens again. “But, like I said, I wonder if people will say, ‘Oh, now he’s just on to the next group of struggling people.’” It can’t be easy being Baker, worrying if he can make the film he wants to make for fear of a backlash, with the alternative being – what? Superheroes? “Exactly! Although at some point I would want to make a popcorn movie. But then, of course, people will say – ” He sneers knowingly – ‘Oh, look! He was just pretending all along.’”

Still evangelical about making films on phones – “I want to tell everyone reading this they have the means to shoot a feature film in their pocket” – he used one only once in The Florida Project, for a single scene in Disney World itself. Filming clandestinely, he says, was how it had to be. “We’re not pointing fingers at Disney. I don’t see them as villainous. The villain is the housing crisis.

“But it’s hard to ask people to pay $17 on a Friday night for a story about the crisis of hidden homelessness in America. So you have to be creative.” He visibly relaxes, happy with his words at last. “You have to be a little subversive.”

The Florida Project is out on 10 November.